


Love’s Labour’s Lost

by Anonymous



Category: Alles was zählt
Genre: Family Issues, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2019-03-02 20:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13325754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Marianne Wild deals with the sudden death of her son Roman.He knew,Marianne thinks, her face still wet.And this was his birthday present for me.





	Love’s Labour’s Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2013. Translated in 2018.

_He knew_ , Marianne thinks as snot and tears run down her chin. Right now, she couldn’t care less about it.

Her sixtieth birthday is only nine weeks away. The whole family is invited. Even the relatives from Saxony-Anhalt, who, at smaller family gatherings, always become the butt of jokes after the fourth Jägermeister. She’s already ordered the buffet and made an appointment with Conny, her hairdresser. She was really looking forward to those blonde highlights.

 _He knew_ , Marianne thinks, her face still wet. _And this was his birthday present for me._

Egon wrinkles his nose when she tells him.

“He’s dead,” she says matter-of-factly. Just like the crying man on the telephone. No consideration for her feelings at all. “Roman died last night.”

There’s no time for her voice to tremble. She has so much to do. First, canceling that hair appointment.

Egon’s quiet for a while, then he coughs. A little cautiously. “What are we having for lunch again?”

She has so much to do.

 

“He did it,” Oma Hertha mumbles over the line.

Marianne doesn’t know what she means, but she has an inkling.

“He’s just as upset as you are,” she lies and tries to push the image of Egon—in Roman’s old room, with all those cardboard boxes—out of her mind. It doesn’t work.

 _Too early_ , she thinks.  
  
Then again, with Roman, everything’s been too early.

C-section at the thirty-first week. Ice-skates for his eighth birthday and, for the following Christmas, a grim-looking Santa. With fourteen, a call from the school: “Your son’s in trouble.” Even after all those years, she’s still thankful that she went alone. Egon would’ve dragged him out of there on his ass if he’d heard his tearful pleas.

_I didn’t do anything! It’s their fault! They’re wrong!_

They weren’t wrong, of course not. No one was wrong.

While Oma Hertha blubbers on about some planned _Sissy_ binge that never happened, Marianne suddenly hears loud noises from upstairs.

Looks like they’re getting that new dining room.

 

Roman’s four, button nose and wide smile, in the photo of him she keeps in her purse. Still with his bangs. She never had the heart to exchange it for the passport photo he sent her shortly after moving out. Next to him, a young man with one of those baseball caps, smiling. On the back, a short note: “Mama, I’m happy!”

They spoke sometimes over the phone, but she never asked about his lifestyle. Or about the articles that popped up once in a while several years ago, speculating about a secret girlfriend. She always collected those with special care and a quiet, peculiar happiness in her heart.  
  
Now, there's only be his obituary left to add to her album. Directly under a photo of him she’d found in a cheap crossword pad about six months ago.

Roman Wild  
1980-2011

Always too early. 

 

It hurts that Roman doesn’t want to rest with his family, but she gets over it like she usually does. She has to. Marianne is too busy for other things.  
  
She draws a pretty pattern into the forest floor with her finger, right in front of Roman’s tree.  
  
The sorrow doesn’t even reach her right away. Just like the name of that nice, foreign-looking man, whose hand rests lightly on her shoulder when she starts to cry.

Later, after she asks again, he introduces himself as “Dennis, just with one _n_ and a _z_ at the end.”

“Roman’s boyfriend,” Florian adds and looks at her meaningfully. “Your son-in-law.”

But how could you have a son-in-law if you never had a son, to begin with?

 

Egon stayed at home. Funeral stress is just bad for his heart and there’s also Formula One on television. He’s such a huge fan of Felipe Massa. And what a son that’d been! At least not dead.  
  
Marianne gets her highlights and Conny even gives her a mourner’s discount. “But only for the first child!” Conny, that old cow, jokes.

The picture of Roman with his bangs is still in Marianne’s purse. Next to it, Florian as a Power Ranger, Fasching 1998. And then there’s a new addition: An attractive, young man who could easily pass for a model. Some people have asked her about him at the supermarket checkout.

“He’s my lover,” she sometimes says with a coquettish grin when she’s out shopping alone.  
  
Because it’s easier. Just another one of her guilty little truths. Like the fact that she detests the new dining room with every fiber of her being, even though, every day, she serves in it without complaint.

 

Marianne’s sixtieth birthday goes smoothly. They already laugh about the Saxony-Anhalt relatives after the third Jägermeister, even though they’re still in the room with them.  
  
The buffet gets praised, just like her hair. People don’t talk about Roman or Florian’s absence. Or about Oma Hertha in her nursing home in Karlsruhe. But that one’s already a family tradition.

She cries, later on, watching his video message. And a little after that. Roman wouldn’t have wanted to see her this way, she knows.

Sometime in the future, at the checkout, Marianne plans to say: “My son-in-law.”

**Author's Note:**

> The most significant change here is Conny's “But only for the first child!” remark. That wasn't in the original version. I realize it's not terribly subtle to have Marianne refer to Deniz as "foreign-looking", especially if she's not even aware of his name, but it felt somehow wrong to cut it out (and maybe there are people like that out there?).


End file.
